Books, Life, Earth

How to get more done in less time

Wake up, check FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, Bloglovin’…. how did an hour go by? This happens more times than I want to admit.

However, since my schedule works out so I only have to be places before noon twice a week, I have had to learn how to manage my time so I don’t feel lazy and so I actually get all of my work done. No more doing homework between classes for me, it happens all before or after.

Since January I have gotten into a couple habits and have felt an increase in my productivity.However, I leave some room to change my routine; I’d go crazy if I didn’t. Here are the ones I use the most.

Set a wake up time

For me, this is 8 a.m. Granted, sometimes I’m feeling super tired and won’t wake up until 9, sometimes I have a test and wake up an hour early to study before my other class that day. The reason I chose 8 a.m. is because my earliest class is at 9 a.m. two days a week and we get no skips so it’s easier for my to not sleep through it if I wake up early most days.

Read while doing cardio at the gym

A couple times a week I go to the gym and do just running and biking, I do weights other days or before a short cardio session. I know a lot of people tend to not be able to read while on the treadmill/ elliptical and I’m one of those people, the bouncing doesn’t work out. That’s Netflix time. However, I try to go on the bike for a little bit because it gets cardio without stressing my knee and I’ll read my fun book during this time. It’s a solid amount of time with no distractions, plus every couple pages I change the difficulty.

Set a timer and do nothing but your task for that amount of time

For me this time is 45 minutes, or whatever I can spare between things. I started setting a timer- and MUTING other notifications (texts, snapchat, etc.) because then I’m not tempted to see how much longer I have until my next thing. Let’s be honest, no one is going to care if you don’t respond to a text for half an hour. This started because I had to read Oliver Twist, and although I really enjoyed that book, I was reading it between things and didn’t want to be taken out of the story until the last possible second.

Of course there are other things I’ve begun doing such as turning off notifications when I get a like on Instagram, FaceBook notifications I don’t care about and likes on Twitter because those would distract me in the middle of things. I’ve also begun having a morning and nighttime routine, so I know exactly what I’m doing before I wake up and go to bed.

I’m experimenting with different productivity tools as well. This week I’ve been creating a to-do list in the morning or at night for the day so I know exactly what I’m doing and it’s been working about half the time, the other half I’m doing more than I would have. I’m working out a balance between having something I enjoy and things I have to do.